This Prom began in sombre and melancholic shades of grey. Then, as her encore, the superb Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili launched into Liszt’s Paganini étude, “La Campanella”, and bells of long-awaited joy rang around the Royal Albert Hall. Under those leaping acrobatic fingers, musical sunshine drove away the clouds.

It started like Sunday afternoon band concert on a seaside promenade, a massive ensemble playing it light. But while there were several too many Shostakovich pops, the Ravel concerto and Walton symphony ahead sailed for deeper waters, And the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is on top form, lucky to have one of the world’s best conductors, Mark Wigglesworth, in charge. 

The auditorium and arena were packed – and the stage even more so, bursting at the seams with players and singers: the perfect set-up for a First Night of the Proms. This is traditionally an opportunity to programme a large-scale choral work, and last night that was Vaughan Williams’s seldom heard Sancta Civitas.

Anyone seeking local genius in an international festival should look no further than the annual Ravenna concerts from Riccardo Muti – Neapolitan by birth, Ravennate by adoption – with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra. Well, maybe a little further if you have basic Italian: 2025 sees the completion of a second walkabout theatre trilogy involving citizens of Ravenna and beyond, masterminded by two greats equal to Muti in their own unique ways, Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli.

Siglo de Oro are a vocal ensemble who specialise in older music – and especially neglected older music – but they have also always programmed new music, and the centrepiece of this recital at the Wigmore Hall was a large-scale commission by composer Ben Rowarth, to words by Sophia Carr-Gomm. And a successful work it was, maintaining interest through its 45-minute span through its strong musical conception, the excellent playing and singing of Siglo de Oro and violinist Amy Tress, and the extra dimension of the live electronics provided by Joe Bates.

Actually it was a Thursday evening to Saturday experience, but what riches in seven concerts. The only Britten I heard was one of the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid as I approached the Red House on a hot Saturday morning, just too late for that pop-up performance, but in time for Berio. The old guard of composers made a mixed impression, but one of several highlights was to discover how imaginative the new generation is proving in six world premieres.

Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to have heard Allan Clayton in Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers. And if anything, the three-part all-Schubert programme was even more levitational than I’d expected.

To mark this year’s summer solstice, a small audience gathered at London’s newest concert venue, the World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, a small and perfectly formed hall bristling with “state-of-the-art” acoustics and digital facilities. On a balmy midsummer’s evening, the pianist and composer Rieko Makita invited us to reflect on the different moods and aspects of the night, in a programme that combined music with digital art projections.

Two concerts in the BBC Philharmonic’s series in their own studio form the climax of studies at the Royal Northern College of Music for a small number of soloists on the postgraduate International Artist Diploma there, and also for some young conductors on the master’s course run by Mark Heron and Clark Rundell.

In the Saxony of 1725 – still in the grip of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” – Bach and his musicians would seldom have had to deal with the sort of midsummer sauna that enveloped Trafalgar Square last night. Yet, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Masaaki Suzuki, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists managed to beat the heat with an exhilarating shirt-sleeved journey through the cantatas that Bach wrote exactly three centuries ago for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.